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Topic: E-mail client recommendations (Read 19595 times)

I have to ask, but what are some decent email clients available right now? I have been using thunderbird for years but have always felt something was missing. The Bat is stuck in the 20th century and feels unfinished in many ways. What does everyone recommend? Perhaps a shoot-out of current email clients would make for a great follow-up to this email client round-up?

I have to ask, but what are some decent email clients available right now? I have been using thunderbird for years but have always felt something was missing. The Bat is stuck in the 20th century and feels unfinished in many ways. What does everyone recommend? Perhaps a shoot-out of current email clients would make for a great follow-up to this email client round-up?

Oh man...if you find anything, I would be totally interested. Several years ago, I moved from Pegasus to the Bat. The Bat is great for multiple accounts, so much better than anything else I've seen. It's very powerful, but all that power is almost useless because there is absolutely zero documentation for any of those powerful features. So it's powerful, but good luck figuring anything out. There are also a few quirks about that really rub me the wrong way, especially with the Microed editor.

Josh - I recommend InScribe or its free, but limited to one account, sister iScribe.

I've been using it for many years, it has rarely caused problems and fits all my needs. It's not perhaps the most sophisticated of clients and does have some rather quirky sides to it (the database for instance) - but I reckon it's great. My mail store is over 650 mbs but is accessible in seconds.

One of its major advantages is the Preview window (checking mail on the server) which is missing in many, even well known, email clients.

It goes without saying that I have tried and tested pretty well all the clients out there.

.: I use K-Meleon - the browser you can control - but I love Pale Moon too :.

One of the longest-serving and free email clients is Pegasus.It can be as sophisticated as you want - very comprehensive settings and features.My experience of using it over the years (since 1997 at least) has been that it is an ace email client, and it was always being kept updated (the technology) so as to keep it in the vanguard. I still have it, but have little need to use it nowadays.

For business use I'm pretty much forced to use Outlook because so many of my clients are on Exchange and use Outlook specific features. What's that old saying about the mountain and Muhammid?

After trying just about everything out there (separately and sometimes in parallel) I'm reluctantly forced to say, from where I'm sitting, Thunderbird is about as good as it gets for a general purpose mail client. Which is not saying much since I'm not particularly crazy about any email client. As as result, I try to use webmail as much as possible these days.

Don't much care for webmail either. But at least I don't need to worry about it crashing as much or unexpectedly corrupting my message store.

I have used Mulberry for more than a decade, and I can't remember it ever crashing or corrupting my message store (perhaps in part because I use IMAP). I still feel that it handles IMAP better than any other email client I've tried (and I've tried quite a few), and it offers some features that I haven't found elsewhere. Still, it hasn't had any substantial development in five or six years, and its approach to graphics and unicode is frustratingly primitive. For those reasons, I can't really recommend it even though I love it, and I continue to look for an email client I'd like better.

I wonder how big the market for desktop email clients really is at this point, or will be in years to come. On sites like DC I see relatively frequent requests for recommendations and just as frequent (or more) laments that the current crop of options is mediocre at best. There seem to be very few modern, up-to-date, and still supported options, commercial or otherwise, so it must just not be a lucrative market. I suppose Outlook is king of the heap and leaves only scraps for everyone else...

Unfortunately I have nothing to contribute here, I just use Gmail/Google Apps.

Out of curiosity - just how complex and difficult an undertaking is it to write a decent e-mail client? I'm guessing fairly difficult considering how relatively few of them there are - and how...uninspired they seem to be?

I have a rather bad taste for webmail interfaces. I often get told to just use gmail. Personally, and no this has nothing to do with Google as a company, I do not like gmail or the way it handles things. The way folders are handled, as tags, really bothers me and their imap implementation is sub-standard.

Mulberry would be nice if it were still in development. Pegasus is one I am trying out now. As much as I hate to say it, thunderbird is probably my best option at this point. I would like to find something else to migrate from that feels more complete and does not feel as "clunky" as t-bird. I still cannot download an attachment from thunderbird without it being corrupted (downloaded attachments are fine from webmail).

I will try each recommendation from this thread. I am very actively seeking something to move me away from t-bird and the mozilla cludge that I have suffered with for so long.

I actually enjoy outlook but it has one thing missing that is a must for me. Folder layouts, when using imap, should remain expanded between software restarts. Right now, I have to expand every folder I usually have open every time I start outlook. If it weren't for that, I would gladly move to it because, let's face it, nothing beats Outlook in terms of speed and functionality.

Outlook (2010) is a reasonable client...until you hook it up to Exchange.

If you use Outlook for automatizing email with encryption while connected to Exchange...welcome to a world of hurt! Completely unnecessary, overly complicated and poorly (read: contradicting) documented hurt...

Speed? Never impressed me much (with or without Exchange "life line").Functionality? Sure, now Microsoft has to follow some KISS-principles and it might be better than reasonable (without Exchange).

My Exchange 2010 setup is an i7 with SATAII discs and 8GByte RAM...and it matches the speed of my old Exchange 2000 server on a Pentium 2 350MHz, 256MByte RAM, IDE disc. Both use default settings, but the overhead has increased dramatically for functionality that is better implemented in other 3rd party software.

The only reason that I use Outlook is because it is the only client that supports extended MAPI (and therefore CAPI).

Lets just say that I will never be or become an Outllook fan, especially after all these years and incarnations that archaic PST/OST structure (including its artificial limits) is still in use today.[/end rant]

Lets just say that I will never be or become an Outllook fan, especially after all these years and incarnations that archaic PST/OST structure (including its artificial limits) is still in use today.[/end rant]

I've heard that "enhanced interrogation techniques" involve forcing victims people to use Outlook and solve PST issues... But those are just rumors. I'm certain nobody is that evil to do anything like that...

I like solutions where I don't waste too much time managing/filing email (dragging into tons of folders just starts taking too long)

I liked Opera M2 for its "one box, virtual folders for on the fly classification" approach, but it would get slow after a certain size (i have years of email) and didn't support tags the way I would like. I need to revisit it though as there are many new versions since I last used it.

I liked Outlook used in a "big mailbox then using virtual folders based on categories and filters" scenario, but Outlook just cannot handle the amount of email I have/had in certain jobs, and I don't like its storage. I used xobni to add some magic as well. But there's a limit to how much it can handle on imap without slowdown

So I currently use postbox which is a shareware cleaned up version of Thunderbird for both mac and windows - neat features around search and threading, very nice for daily use, some clever web integrations. Compatible with a subset of Thunderbird add-ons especially gpg (which is actually how I found it). I especially love the summarized and conversations views, very handy on long work discussions. http://postbox-inc.com/features

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Works with Dropbox, Evernote, and more!Send Dropbox links instead of the filesSend message content to Evernote on the MacUse Date Detection to quickly create events in iCal, Google Calendar, or the Lightning Calendar Add-onSupport for the newest version of Growl (1.3)

Canned ResponsesCreate a set of pre-built templates specifically tailored for message repliesSuper useful for replying to common inquiries

New OS Integration FeaturesSupport for Mac OS X Full Screen Mode and Trackpad / Mighty Mouse GesturesWindows 7 Jump Lists and improved interoperability with the popular Minimize to Tray Add-on.

Hope it's an independently developed and code-clean TBird lookalike rather than a "cleaned up" version. Because if it's just a reworked and recompiled copy of TBird with some proprietary code mixed in (something I've long suspected) they'll have to make their source code available. Otherwise it's a pretty serious GPL violation.

It's officially released under MPL along with GPL and LGPL since sections of the incorporated code base had already been released under those licenses. Which Mozilla honors BTW. GPL requires source code be made available if any GPLed code is used in a subsequent piece of software. GPL doesn't go away just because you wrote a new license (or some code) around it. "In for a penny - in for a pound" as the saying goes.

FWIW Mozilla's main concern is protecting the use of it's name and trademarks. They're not overly concerned about their code because they already view it as open and make it available.

I don't think doing that necessarily complies with the conditions of the GPL (which has some words about not being allowed to "cherry pick" which licenses apply to what if you use GPL code in a larger work) but I may be wrong - and I've strayed far enough off topic that we'll leave that for another day and another discussion. Better yet, let's leave that to Mozilla since Thunderbird is their child.

I liked Opera M2 for its "one box, virtual folders for on the fly classification" approach, but it would get slow after a certain size (i have years of email) and didn't support tags the way I would like. I need to revisit it though as there are many new versions since I last used it.

You should definitely revisit it. In the latest versions of Opera, the mail client is operating much faster with a large mailbase. The email database loads independently -after- Opera has started, so browser startup itself is a lot better with a lot of mail.

I also really like Postbox, especially as gmail is my primary email provider. Postbox's gmail support integration is by far the best I've seen.